The Avocado Paint Saga

So, I have this random closet in my bus that I let my siblings draw all over with sharpies. One wall you kind of can see from the living room/kitchen/desk area so I decided to paint it. I picked out some all the paint chips and agonized over them for a week or probably more like a month. Then I got a week where I worked a lot of hours and I had a little extra moola to spend on superfluous things like paint and Welch's fruit snacks and crayons and other grown up things. So off I go to town, thirty minutes away, with my littlest brother in tow. We put the windows down and turn the radio up.

I have a confusing conversation with a very patient but obviously tired and stressed Lowe's employee about what kind of paint I'm looking for. I forgot it was Memorial Day Weekend, hence all the vacationers would be coming in to their summer houses about thirty minutes from that particular establishment. I settle on a kind of paint and a color. I believe the word on the paint chip was avocado. Like, the outside of an avocado. A dark, woodsy green. 

Plants are on sale at Lowe's! I buy this cool rubbery plant for two dollars. I don't know what it is, but it's awesome. I hope I don't kill it. I also buy a Goldon Pothos for the exact reason that I have grown these before and discovered they are virtually impossible to kill. That's my kind of houseplant, if you know what I mean.

The Cool Rubbery Plant

We buy chicken nuggets at McDonald's and then stop at Goodwill and buy my little brother a giant stuffed panda bear for three dollars (You should have seen his face light up when he saw it, he just saw Kung Fu Panda 3 the other night. lol) and I get into a long conversation with a lady named Sharon who is buying pillows and might have a mini-fridge for me if I want to pick it up sometime. We take our bear and our chicken nuggets and our paint and plants and various other items and pack them into my tiny little car for the thirty minute ride home.

We pull in the driveway and park. The lil' guy heaves and grunts and hauls his giant panda bear up to his room. I drive to the bus and heave and grunt and haul all of my new found treasures in. I joyously spread newspaper and turn on the radio to settle in for a few relaxing hours of painting and general lolly-gagging, feeling very accomplished in all my grown-up-and-buying-paint-by-myself-ness.

I open my paint can and mix it with the little wooden ruler thing they give you. It looks bright but I am not worried. I still have full and unquestioning trust in the colors of paint chips. The Pina Colada song plays, and I begin painting blissfully.

You can't really see it here, but it was blindingly bright.

It is not long before I realize that the light reflecting off of the very subtly green metal roof is making the paint look an entirely different color than I had thought it would. In fact, it looks like a neon sign. Or tennis balls. Or green grapes. Or this telephone I found on google images:

The paint looks chartreuse. 

*I commence panicking mildly*

I call my mother. (So much for my being an accomplished adult.) My mom does not pick up. She probably left her phone somewhere. I text my aunt a picture. We discuss paint colors and how you can take it back and get more color put in it if it's the wrong color. I decide to do one coat in the chartreuse and then go back and see if I can figure out how to either turn the chartreuse paint into avocado paint or buy a new can of perhaps 'midnight pine' paint or something like that. I finish the coat of glaringly bright paint and sit down to read five chapters of 'Don Quixote'. 

I sit and read so long that by the time I come back to look at the paint, it is dry. And guess what? No longer, is it chartreuse. It is now a very respectable cilantro. Sure, it's brighter than what I was going for to begin with. But, bright is good. Bright means happy. And it is no longer the color of a lime popsicle that threw up. So, I can live happily ever after with cilantro. Crisis averted.

It kind of reminds me of a Tex-Mex restaurant crossed with a kindergarten. It's very festive, which I like. I just need to dig out the confetti now....

End of Saga